Abstract

We live in a world of systems driven by cause and effect. Those systems include financial, production, inventory, biological, chemical, thermodynamic or workflow. Systems can be modeled as nodes representing system variables and connecting lines representing causal effects. Determining production rate considering costs and revenues in order to maximize profit is one of the applied problems in small factories. Mostly existing models in production planning consider production system static and specify production rate, although the factors determining production rate include many different changes in practice.

The changing value of one variable can cause another to increase or decrease as described by equations. Understanding how a system really works is the first step towards using, improving, automating or explaining it to others. This paper shows how to model dynamic systems, with an example of production system of a small foundry and present the system behavior with charts, graphs and tables.